Reading: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Moving: weights Thursday, mulch and Nordic Track Saturday

Listening: possibly the Cowboy Junkies next Saturday!

4-5 May 2001: Anyone who's ever had a heart

It turned out I could walk Wednesday. I didn't, because I got little sleep and slept until 7:00 and took the bus. I don't know why my body wouldn't sleep. It hates me. And I was careful with it shoveling, dropping into horse stance to get a shovelload of dirt and straightening my legs and being Very Very Careful not to use my back at all.

Horse stance. What a killer. When SEM was in prime fighting condition, you could stand on his thighs while he held horse stance: thighs at a 45-degree angle from each other and parallel to the floor, with torso and shins perpenicular to the foor.

But I still didn't sleep, which meant that Wednesday I was brain-tired and, I'm sure, more tired in body than it would have been if it had graced me with eight hours sleep.

And it snowed Wednesday, not Thursday, and it's continued to precipitate, yesterday and today with rain. And tomorrow more of the same. This means that KBCO's annual Kinetics fest, in which a lot of people build vessels that don't quite stay afloat or that move in weird ways or whatever it is, has been rescheduled from tomorrow to next Saturday, which means that the original band can't make it but that the Cowboy Junkies can! Wheeee!

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A good haul from the library yesterday: In Cold Blood, All the President's Men, The Group, and A Handful of Dust. I was in the Ws, yes, but Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was out. I'm reading the Capote now. It'll be a good quick read. I went with Egg, who asked me how long it would take me to read them all. Err. I am determined to read Mary McCarthy but I'm not going to beat myself up if I can't get through Warren or Waugh. That's how this list is going.

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A productive Saturday so far. Up at 7:00, shower contacts banana dress boots out. First stop, Home Despot for a new tarp, since the original one is filthy with mud and torn as well and wouldn't protect the car. Second stop, Veterans Park for the Treecycle Mulch Giveaway. What a deal. I got my Christmas tree back and several others, in little tiny pieces. Wednesday it snowed and since then it's rained with occasional snow, the longest bout of wet I can remember in the time we've lived here. Happily the mulch was dry under the few first inches and easy to shovel. I filled Cassidy's hatchback. Third stop, Rite-Aid, because I am always so on time picking up my pills, but it wouldn't open until 9:00. Lie-abed whippersnappers! Fourth stop, the alley, where I emptied the hatch into the garage. Fifth stop was home, a bowl of cereal and The Nation. I had to go out anyway, I figured, and the getting of the mulch went so quickly before....So I retraced my steps, to Rite-Aid for the pill and back for another load of mulch, and the alley again. (I plan to dig out as much square footage of the easement as my pile of mulch can replace in a three-inch layer, over another layer of pulp from Alfalfa's juicers. For this summer, I won't have to water that much of it; by next summer, all that will, I hope, have composted enough to plant low-water ground covers.)

Now I am home and plan to stay home until this evening, when the plan is to see "Bridget Jones's Diary."

And it's a good thing I was home, because around 11 I got a call I wasn't expecting. I picked up the downstairs phone, the old white corded thing I had in college, and said hello. "Is this ljh?" Yes, warily. "This is Charles Foster" [not really]. Yes, still wondering. "You just sent me the nicest note."
"Oh! You must be the former owner of the house!" And he was.

After I switched phones for the unbuzzy cordless, we talked for 45 minutes. The Fosters loved my note and he said I should go into public relations. He and his wife bought the house in 1971, had two kids in it, worked for the Denver Public Library throughout their time here, and returned to Minnesota in 1987. He and his wife planted all the fruit trees. They planted twelve trees altogether, of which seven remain alive; an eighth remains in the form of a Russian olive stump and I've never seen a trace of the other four. They did the kitchen with its black and white tile and the bathroom (I didn't say anything about the bathroom, because all I could think to ask was whatever in the world might he have against bathtubs?). They, not the freak, put in my study, creating it from space that used to be for a gravity furnace, which they also replaced with a gas furnace. (I think the freak might have just made the archway wider or put on the oak trim when she installed the television shrine.) The Fosters stripped all the paint from the (fir) wood trim in the living room on the principle that any wood is better than paint; he was distressed to hear it had been painted over but glad to know RDC is rebuilding the molding (out of poplar, which we are going to paint, a piece of news I glossed over). They loved the house, loved Denver; their children were in sixth and fourth grades when they returned to Minnesota and cried when they were told the family was going to move.

They go on the Christmas card list.